My understanding of what happened in the France election is that many of the more leftist candidates stepped aside so that voters had much more limited choices. I think they have many parties and it isn’t unusual to have 6-7 candidates for one position. They figured out that they were splitting the vote and agreed to not run some candidates to improve the chances of defeating the National Rally candidate. It worked. The representation splits are something like Far Left 181 seats, Macron 161 seats and LePen 143. Apologies of the numbers aren’t precise, but I don’t think there was necessarily voter fraud.
I was not aware of the tactical decision to narrow the Leftist field.
That explains the sensible method to shrink LePen’s strength very quickly, following her extraordinary success in that preliminary “snap” election.
That SNAP election was probably produced by the fearful Leftist enemies of LePen, only to measure her threat level against them.
They were able, in only days, to set her on her heels and behind Crazy Macron, into third place. 😳
Maybe the Left didn’t even vote full strength in that Snap election. The difference in LePen’s projectory from then, in only a few days, was made a pretty stunning reversal in the Round 2.
Tactics matter and misleading conservative media is often hyped. 🙇♀️